Christopher

Chris’ Final Video

Hey Internet!

Jeremy made some awesome videos of our projects! Here’s my demonstration of my LED cube! Enjoy!

As the Lights Fade: The End of BSE

Hey internet, it’s Chris again!

Bluestamp Engineering is wrapping up, and it’s time to say goodbye! I am very proud of the really cool project I have built, and the potential that it holds! I have not finished the improvement yet: my snake program. It proved to be very difficult, and other errors got in the way of its completion. However, I intend to work on it at home after the program, and I feel like I have a good understanding of how to complete it.

Bluestamp Engineering was an amazing educational experience. I learned more in 6 weeks of a half day program than I would have in a year or two searching the internet for project ideas. The program left me with a sense of accomplishment, and a desire to build and learn more!

My future goals for this project would be to gather a following around the LED cube I designed, and to develop and publish a kit that I could sell to an electronics retail website like adafruit or sparkfun. Since the cube is really just a platform, anyone can design for it, especially because I have allowed for game integration with the joystick and pushbuttons.

Feel free to follow me on Github, and check out my awesome Github page for my project! I will continue to use my github account, and I will update the github page for this project as I add more onto it!

Bluestamp will have a booth at the NYC Maker Faire, and I hope to have snake working by then! I have actually been in love with maker faire ever since my first time a couple years ago, making this a great opportunity to get noticed!

Some of my friends and I are running a website, and last year we did official press coverage of Makerfaire: Check it out! We plan to come back this year!

The website is called geekswithnosocialskills.com; we post about science, technology, videogame news, and snippets that we find interesting. On our youtube channel we do videogame Let’s-plays. We hope to do some cool live action videos, as well as interesting interviews!

Bluestamp Engineering has definitely made my summer, and will greatly assist in my future endeavors in electronics and engineering! I’d like to thank all the instructors, and the founders of BSE, Dave and Robin! Thanks for making this program a nonpareil educational and fun summer experience!

Looks like this is the curtain call, I guess it’s time to leave !

Cya later internet!

– Chris

LED Cube Update!

Hey internet, it’s Chris again!

Recently I have started the beginnings of snake using my LED cube. Snake, if you don’t know, is a retro arcade game (for those of my generation) in which you control a snake and try to eat food to get bigger. The point of the game is to become as large as possible without accidentally running into yourself. I have started this program by using the Joystick and pushbuttons to move the snake across all 64 LEDs.

In addition, I have made an HTML form that utilizes arrays of checkboxes to output code compatible with Arduino that selects for the LEDs that were checked to turn on. This program is really cool, and it saves a lot of time! I hope to use this program to make more complex animations. Through making this program, I have become more used to HTML, which will definitely become useful for me in the future.

Here’s the video where I display the progress I’ve made. Enjoy!

– Chris

Chris’ LED Cube Milestone

Hey internet, this is Chris!

I’ve gotten very far along with my LED Cube project, which I have been working on as my intensive project. To start, my project was basically soldering LEDs until I was DONE soldering LEDs. I built the cube, soldered it to the proto-board, added resistors and transistors as needed in the schematic, and wired it all up to the arduino. Last week, we finally got it lit up!

I am now getting into the programming phase, as I have just finished soldering in my pushbuttons, and even a Joystick! As I mentioned in the video, I am going to use the Joystick to make a Snake game in 3D! This project only gets cooler from here!

Watch the video for more detailed info about the project!

I’ll keep you posted!

– Chris

Here’s a link to my Github page for it. I don’t have much yet, but I will eventually make a dedicated Github site for the project with important notes and videos. I may also make an instructable for the project after the program is over.

Here’s the video:

Chris’s Laser Target Starter Project

For my starter project, I built an LED laser target. It’s basic operation is that it responds to a laser, or any light for that matter, by using a photo-resistor. The photo-resistor changes the resistance of LEDs that are connected in series, thus variably adjusting the LED brightness based on the light intensity. There is also a potentiometer that alters the light sensitivity, so that the project can be adjusted to the ambient light level.

It is used by twisting the potentiometer, which changes the total resistance in the circuit, so that the LEDs have JUST turned off. This means that they are normally off while the circuit is in the ambient light. Then, one can shine a light (or laser) on it, which will change the brightness of the LEDs based on the intensity of the light because the photo-resistor changes the resistance of the circuit.

I really liked the project, and I thought it was fun to build! I accidentally soldered all of the LEDs in the WRONG DIRECTION, which proved to me that diodes are truly “one way tunnels” for electricity. This project improved my soldering skills (not to mention DE-Soldering skills!), as well as expanding what I knew about electronic components.